The View co-host Whoopi Goldberg has apologised to Turning Point USA on air for wrongly linking a conservative student group to a neo-Nazi protest in her remarks.
“You know, in Monday’s conversation about Turning Point USA, I put the young people at the conference in the same category as the protesters outside,” she said during Thursday’s ABC broadcast.
“I don’t like it when people make assumptions about me, and it’s not any better when I make assumptions about other people, which I did. So my bad. I’m sorry.”
Her apology came after her colleague Sara Haines issued a clarification and apology after the daytime talk show was threatened with a cease and desist for incorrectly stating earlier this week that a group of neo-Nazis who held a small rally outside the conservative group’s Florida conference were tied to the event.
“So on Monday we talked about the fact that there were openly neo-Nazi demonstrators outside the Florida student action summit of the Turning Point USA group,” said co-host Ms Haines during Wednesday’s show.
“We want to make clear that these demonstrators were gathered outside the event and that they were not invited or endorsed by Turning Point USA.”
“A Turning Point USA spokesman said the group ‘100 percent condemns those ideologies’ and said Turning Point USA security tried to remove the neo-Nazis from the area but could not because they were on public property,” Ms Haines continued.
The weekend-long TPUSA Student Action Summit was held in Tampa, Florida where Republican leaders like Ted Cruz, Matt Gaetz, former president Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene made appearances and speeches in an event that claimed to provide students with leadership skills.
Videos from outside the event showed about a dozen people adorned with signs and flags that had neo-Nazi imagery emblazoned across them.
The weekend story got picked up on Monday by The View hosts, who had slammed the group.
Co-host Joy Behar said: “Neo-Nazis were out there in the front of the conference with anti-Semitic slurs and, you know, the Nazi swastika and a picture of a so-called Jewish person with exaggerated features, just like Goebbels did during the Third Reich. It’s the same thing, right out of that same playbook.”
Later, after outrage from the conservative group, the programme read an on-air legal disclaimer to say that TPUSA condemned the neo-Nazis protesters and said they had “nothing to do” with the organisation.
However, Ms Goldberg said: “But you let them in, and you knew what they were”.
She later clarified that her point was “metaphorical” after they were made to read a second disclaimer.
The daytime talk show triggered further outrage, with #SuetheView trending on social media from Monday to Tuesday.
Ms Goldberg’s apology on Thursday came after the group reprimanded the host for remaining silent.
“Whoopi remained silent and has not retracted her comments that TPUSA ‘metaphorically’ embraced ‘Nazis,’” the group tweeted.
TPUSA had sent a cease-and-desist letter to ABC and accused The View’s co-hosts of making “defamatory statements”.
